– 40 –

The Basilica

Big bowl at sky-level, towering
the town, visible beyond the boundary,
radiating at so many miles distant
boom, boom heavy as Rome, the masonry
a kind of rock formation.
Steps above the avenue tall doors
swung, bells tackled
morning's sleep-filled air

—I felt their sound like a warning.
Pulling behind the family procession
into shadows, the tiled expanse like an ice-rink
—this was no one's home.
God had his eye inside our heads—
all our faces turning up to pray
—his ear was in our souls
listening for a footstep making stray.

Home Town

Down in the main street
where the winds smell of crop and sea
blowing hot, blowing cold
the day finds me—back in my home town
dazed by the light.

– 41 –

Famous for concrete power poles, macaroni
and a race horse called Phar Lap—
the town that loomed in memory strangely shrunken.
With stations to fill up when passing through,
you can hear the strangers leaving,
the single main street joins to Highway One
north, south—it's a straight run.

Large as ever—the plains
peel off the boundary, back to hills.
The lines of paddocks square up to each other.
I can smell that space on street corners
—the broad Fords of farmers nose from carparks,
painted with the dust of tertiary roads.

Spear leaves of cabbage trees
edged on the wind—
there's a port for the grain and the meat
and a bay for the summer—and the wind
rumbles through most days with discontent or hunger.

I walk down the aisle
of Whitcoulls where aunt served.
With small change in her pocket
calling up to her boss that she's just
stepping out for a coffee—
I go where we would have gone.
I sit in May's Milk Bar and the town
sits about me as if it had never been far.

– 42 –

First Sailing

I rolled on and off the bunk.
My mother hung our coats on hangers,
everything went sideways.
I stretched my legs up
and clamped my feet to the ceiling.
Tea broke over the cup's lip
—we were out at sea.

Decks below the engines gurgled
in their grease, after that there was a skin
of metal and rivets that kept us from the water.
The water was dark, live, and so deep
that if you fell into it you would fall
and fall passing fish with neon eyes
—it would take days to reach the end.

My mother said ‘get into your pyjamas
and brush your teeth’ like it was home
—but no land was in view. It was all sea.
The water in my body
swished to and fro like the tea.

So in the morning I was amazed
that we had made it through the night.
I put my face to the porthole
to thank the fish and water for our lives
but a wave, coming sideways,
eyed me with its hollow. This was the sea.
It could swallow the whole ferry if it wanted to.

‘Breakfast’ my mother was saying
as if from far away, everything balanced on a tray.

– 43 –

Cottage

I tread lightly around the ruins,
solid stone on a soaked earth bed.
I tread as if I were trespassing,
as if the wind were wired
and the dead could be woken.

I draw the window in quietly
and watch the rain, feeling how
each wall is working back into the hill.
The stones like childhoods, letting go
their hold inside the rain.

Cows wade in the dark peat mud.
The brown earth extends
beyond folds of ashen heather
and furrows of the bog, a vantage point
that reaches to the strand—

the Atlantic. As if there were clues
that could come back off that sea,
rewinding his passage in slow motion.
As if the warm interior were still here
like an origin, my father
having a word in my ear.